There are times when the channel of written speech seems to afford too narrow an outlet for the flood of passion storming through it. Unamuno seems to be impatient of the mutism of the printed page, as if, like the written score of music, it were incomplete lacking embodiment in sound. The written symbols are an inadequate substitute for the bodily presence, incapable of conveying the conviction, the force, the sense of mass, which only the living organism with all its full-charged vitality can impart. It might even be conjectured that for Unamuno writing is after all only a _pis-aller_--he would prefer to talk, or rather he would prefer to dispense with words altogether and impose himself in some transcendental act of communion. Of one of Goya’s pictures, the tumultuous _Third of May_ in the Prado, the Italian critic De Amicis says: “It is the last point which painting can reach before being transmuted into action; having passed this point, one throws away the brush and seizes the dagger.” A similar sense of an intolerable straining of the medium is sometimes felt in reading Unamuno. The texture of language is stretched to the breaking-point; words are contorted in an endeavour to force them beyond the limits of their capacity; grammar and syntax collapse before the rush of passionate utterance. It is the pressure and drive of a whole personality that seeks to translate itself into words and finds in the end that it is untranslatable. The impulse towards action and the exertion of personal influence which forms one of the dominant features of Unamuno’s character, finds a considerable part of its expression in his participation in the public affairs of his country. He has little patience with the view that the scholar or professor ought to stand aside from the larger issues of the day in order to devote all his energies to perfecting himself as a machine for grinding out erudition and culture. Indeed, he considers that politics are themselves an invaluable instrument of culture, in that for large masses of the people they provide the principal, perhaps the only avenue of approach to a consideration of general ideas. Devoting himself in his political activities primarily to the exposition of these general ideas, the basic principles of citizenship, Unamuno has always evinced a whole-hearted contempt for that preoccupation with political machinery and an intrigue which tends to make the professional politician, particularly perhaps in Spain, little more than an electioneerer. Unamuno is among the prophets rather than the politicians, and his followers form not a party but a band of disciples. “All round the ring,” he said to me once, “sit the spectators. They applaud or hiss. But down in the arena, there I fight alone, face to face with the bull.”